It’s great when you have an opportunity to test the impact of PR… without even trying to.

We work with a new car deals website called CarQuake and, unexpectedly, on Sunday, it was referenced in an article in the Sunday Times Newspaper – and at the same time, it was also posted online on timesonline.co.uk

Want to know some numbers? Well, it’s not particularly surprising that direct and searched for ‘CarQuake’ visitors went up by about 600 on Sunday, and 400 on Monday which can be pretty much attributable to the newspaper article. It’s also not necessarily surprising that visitors direct from Times Online went up from 97 on Sunday to 104 on Monday – note that the figure rose at the start of the working week (get back to work!!).

And we can, sort of, put a value on these things if we know that a new visitor to CarQuake is ‘worth’ about 20p to the business (so the times mention, so far, is worth about £240 in direct attributable value, and about the same again in brand awareness).

However, we are expecting two things to happen:
a) That the timesonline.co.uk article will eventually pass the print version in terms of overall traffic generated as the ‘tail’ for online is 6 months plus (though it does deteriorate)
b) That we can see from our stats that the direct traffic (and search engine traffic from ‘CarQuake’ searches) is slightly ‘stickier’ than those from Times Online and convert better
Not to mention that the direct link from Times Online will benefit the search ranking of CarQuake in the medium to long term.

Still, it does mean that there are ways of measuring these things… it’s just whether you have the right tools in place to do the job! Ciao…